Snark Wars

The latest volley in the war of words waged by cultured despisers of Christianity was fired on Christmas Day. Celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the television series Cosmos, bushwhacked Christians with this tweeted broadside: On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642. Not content with just one shot, Tyson let fly again. Merry Christmas to all, he tweeted. A Pagan holiday (BC) becomes a Religious holiday (AD). Which then becomes a Shopping holiday (USA). Then, the coup de grace. QUESTION: This year, what do all the world\u27s Muslims and Jews call December 25th? ANSWER: Thursday. [excerpt

Frequency and risk factors for incident and redetected Chlamydia trachomatis infection in sexually active, young, multi-ethnic women: a community based cohort study.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the frequency and risk factors for incident and redetected Chlamydia trachomatis infection in sexually active, young, multi-ethnic women in the community. DESIGN: Cohort study. SETTING: 20 London universities and Further Education colleges. PARTICIPANTS: 954 sexually experienced women, mean age 21.5 years (range 16-27), 26% from ethnic minorities, who were recruited to the Prevention of Pelvic Infection (POPI) chlamydia screening trial between 2004 and 2006, and returned repeat postal self-taken vaginal swabs 11-32 (median 16) months after recruitment. RESULTS: The estimated annual incidence of chlamydia infection among 907 women who tested negative at baseline was 3.4 per 100 person-years (95% CI 2.5 to 4.6 per 100 person-years), but 6.6 per 100 person-years (95% CI 4.5 to 9.3 per 100 person-years) in the 326 teenagers (<20 years). Predictors of incident chlamydia infection were age <20 years (relative risk (RR) 4.0, 95% CI 2.1 to 7.5), and (after adjusting for age) a new sexual partner during 12 months follow-up (RR 4.4, 95% CI 2.0 to 9.9), smoking (RR 2.2 95% CI 1.2 to 3.9), concurrent bacterial vaginosis (RR 2.0 95% CI 1.1 to 3.9) and high risk carcinogenic human papillomavirus (RR 2.2, 95% CI 1.1 to 4.3). Of 47 women positive for chlamydia at baseline, 12 (25.5%, 95% CI 13.9% to 40.3%) had redetected infection at a median of 16 months follow-up. Taking into account follow-up time (65 person-years), the annual redetection rate was 18.5 per 100 person-years (95% CI 9.9 to 30.0 per 100 person-years). CONCLUSIONS: One in four women with chlamydia infection at baseline retested positive, supporting recent recommendations to routinely retest chlamydia positives

Orange Is the New Golgotha

The Roman soldiers jeered at Jesus, called him towelhead and sand monkey, ripped off his garments and clad him in an orange jumpsuit. Then they pulled a black sack over his head and led him to an interrogation cell, where CIA operatives awaited him. They shackled Jesus\u27s wrists and strung him up so that he dangled from the ceiling. One of them questioned him, and when his responses weren\u27t to their liking, the other beat him. [excerpt

Outbreak in Washington, DC: The 1857 Mystery of the National Hotel Disease

The National was once the grandest hotel in the capital. In 1857, it twice hosted President-elect James Buchanan and his advisors, and on both occasions, most of the party was quickly stricken by an acute illness. Over the course of several months, hundreds fell ill, and over thirty died from what became known as the National Hotel disease. Buchanan barely recovered enough to give his inauguration speech. Rumors ran rampant across the city and the nation. Some claimed that the illness was born of a sewage “effluvia,” while others darkly speculated about an assassination attempt by either abolitionists or southern slaveowners intent on war. Author Kerry Walters investigates the mysteries of the National Hotel disease. [From the publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1064/thumbnail.jp

Rachel Weeping: A Christian Pacifist Reluctantly Endorses Military Strikes Against ISIS

I\u27m haunted these days by a scene from Matthew\u27s Gospel. Herod, learning that an infant has been born in Bethlehem who will become King of the Jews, orders the slaughter of the town\u27s male children two years old and under. Matthew captures the deed\u27s mind-numbing horror by imagining that Rachel, one of the traditional Hebrew matriarchs, weeps and laments and refuses to be comforted, because her children are no more. How, I ask myself, would Jesus\u27s followers have acted could they\u27ve been in Bethlehem on that frenzied day? Would they have remained silent? Would they have shielded the infants with their own bodies, buying the victims a few more seconds of life? Or would they have picked up any makeshift weapon they could find to protect the innocents from cruel death? [excerpt

Faith Matters: Reflections on the Christian Life

In a day in which Christians too often reduce faith to mere sentimentality and atheists decry it as superstitious nonsense, Fr. Kerry Walters offers a series of reflections intended to show that, indeed, faith matters. Drawn from his popular weekly newspaper column “Faith Matters,” these short meditations explore Christian faith from the perspectives of doctrine, spirituality, ethics, politics, art and science, the saints, and the holy seasons that mark the Christian year and set the rhythm of Christian living.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1155/thumbnail.jp

The Passion of the Infant Christ: Critical Edition

Although forgotten until quite recently, Caryll Houselander, who died in 1954, was a sensitive and profound English Roman Catholic writer on Christian spirituality. In this critical edition of her 1949 book The Passion of the Infant Christ, Houselander argues that the physical world is an inscaped revelation of the mind of the Creator. Every concrete object and every temporal event mirrors the eternal, just as the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus mirror the circumstances surrounding his death and resurrection. Editor Kerry Walters discusses both Houselander\u27s life and the primary themes of The Passion of the Infant Christ in his introduction to this critical edition of one of Houselander\u27s most insightful books.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1117/thumbnail.jp

Thermal instability of a compound resonator

We investigate the thermal and Kerr nonlinearity in a system of two optically-coupled silica microtoroid resonators experimentally and theoretically. A model for two coupled oscillators describing nonlinear resonance curves is developed. Stability of the static solutions is analyzed. It is shown that thermal nonlinearity is responsible for driving the eigenfrequencies of the two resonators apart, making the normal modes of the system unstable as the pump power grows. The red-detuned normal mode becomes unstable for certain pumping powers

Inferring Latent States and Refining Force Estimates via Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Modeling in Single Particle Tracking Experiments

Optical microscopy provides rich spatio-temporal information characterizing in vivo molecular motion. However, effective forces and other parameters used to summarize molecular motion change over time in live cells due to latent state changes, e.g., changes induced by dynamic micro-environments, photobleaching, and other heterogeneity inherent in biological processes. This study focuses on techniques for analyzing Single Particle Tracking (SPT) data experiencing abrupt state changes. We demonstrate the approach on GFP tagged chromatids experiencing metaphase in yeast cells and probe the effective forces resulting from dynamic interactions that reflect the sum of a number of physical phenomena. State changes are induced by factors such as microtubule dynamics exerting force through the centromere, thermal polymer fluctuations, etc. Simulations are used to demonstrate the relevance of the approach in more general SPT data analyses. Refined force estimates are obtained by adopting and modifying a nonparametric Bayesian modeling technique, the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Switching Linear Dynamical System (HDP-SLDS), for SPT applications. The HDP-SLDS method shows promise in systematically identifying dynamical regime changes induced by unobserved state changes when the number of underlying states is unknown in advance (a common problem in SPT applications). We expand on the relevance of the HDP-SLDS approach, review the relevant background of Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes, show how to map discrete time HDP-SLDS models to classic SPT models, and discuss limitations of the approach. In addition, we demonstrate new computational techniques for tuning hyperparameters and for checking the statistical consistency of model assumptions directly against individual experimental trajectories; the techniques circumvent the need for "ground-truth" and subjective information.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures. Differs only typographically from PLoS One publication available freely as an open-access article at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.013763